A dig­i­tal printer had been mod­i­fied so that it can con­tin­u­ously per­form print­ing on a looped-back sheet of pa­per, run­ning through cy­cles over and over again. An ink sup­ply sys­tem – con­tain­ing a 5 litre can of ink con­nected to the car­tridge is then con­nected to the hacked printer, it is thus able to print non-stop through­out the du­ra­tion of the whole ex­hi­bi­tion, about 2 months, re­lent­lessly re­pro­duc­ing the same line ‘I print, there­fore I am’ (rephrased from ‘I think, there­fore I am’- René Descartes, Dis­cours de la Meth­ode, 1637).

Through con­tin­u­ous repet­i­tive ac­tiv­ity the printer man­i­fests its own ex­is­tence, func­tion­ing in ac­cor­dance with the prin­ci­ples of me­chan­i­cal, in­dus­trial and con­sumer cul­ture, formed dur­ing the 20th cen­tury and now be­com­ing some­what ob­so­lete. This work also ref­er­ences that the ori­gin of these prin­ci­ples evolved from the in­ven­tion of print­ing tech­nol­ogy, which re­mains the tem­plate for all sub­se­quent mech­a­ni­sa­tion.

It is ob­vi­ous that the “Ty­po­graphic trance” is be­com­ing ob­so­lete and is re­placed by more so­phis­ti­cated me­dia tech­nolo­gies which pro­vide us with more op­por­tu­ni­ties for proac­tive re­ac­tion. In this con­text spec­ta­tor is pro­posed to think of the printer, as the world’s last work­ing printer, still print­ing, re­lent­lessly and point­lessly, with­out be­ing aware of the fact that new logic has come into force.

I Print, Therefore I Am1

I Print, Therefore I Am2

I Print, Therefore I Am3

I Print, Therefore I Am4

The post I Print, Therefore I Am appeared first on Cyland Video Archive.

The work URL Stones aims to study the various properties and longevity of media carriers that we as-sign the function of storing, transmitting and preserving knowledge, data and information. The investigation will juxtapose the same information being held/transmitted by two mediums, which have fundamentally different properties. The mediums include: firstly a text carved into stone in an archaic way, in accordance to how knowledge used to be preserved by ancient civilizations and secondly an encyclopedic article posted on Wikipedia, perhaps now the most common and progressive method of documenting and gaining knowledge to date.  The text carved onto a marble plaque includes a URL address, that refers to an image of this particular marble plaque which is located within the Wikipedia media storage (Wikimedia Commons), followed by the Wikipedia article. The article contains detailed information about the purpose & creation of the marble plaque as well as its cur¬rent location and condition, available for updating by the current holder of the plaque or any other Wiki user, in accordance with the democratic idea underlying the ideological principles of the site. The project is not complete until one of two media carriers is eventually lost, thus revealing it’s less durable qualities in site of the other. Which one will be lost first? Only time will tell…

URL-Stone3

URL-Stone2

URL-Stone1

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